Qualcomm Kicks Off Midrange 4G Fight

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Qualcomm kicked off the next round of competition in smartphones with its announcement of high-end and midrange LTE chips last week. Broadcom, Mediatek, and others are expected to join the 4G handset battle in 2014.

Qualcomm's 28 nm Snapdragon 410, announced Dec. 9, will pack a multimode LTE baseband along with a 64-bit core, an upgraded Adreno 306 GPU, and support for 1080-progressive video playback and a 13 megapixel camera.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 410 will pack a multimode LTE baseband along with a 64-bit core. The company said it intends to make LTE available across all of the Snapdragon products, gunning for midrange handsets around the globe. (Source) Qualcomm

Perhaps even more significantly, the company said it intends to make LTE available across all of the Snapdragon products, gunning for midrange handsets around the globe, including China, which approved plans for its 4G networks last week.

“We are excited to bring 4G LTE to highly affordable smartphones at a sub $150 price point with the introduction of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor,” said Jeff Lorbeck, senior vice president and chief operating officer, Qualcomm Technologies, China.

The new Snapdragon chips are expected to sample in early 2014 and appear in commercial devices by the second half of the year. They will go up against offerings in the works at Broadcom, Mediatek, and other vendors struggling for a stake in an expanding market for 4G handsets.

"The takeup of LTE is going much faster than anyone anticipated, where every country now is getting serious about it. It’s no longer just a very high-end superphone; you’re seeing LTE come down into more mainstream models," Broadcom CTO Henry Samueli told EE Times. "We bought Renesas Mobile… so that helped us take the next step in getting a very mature LTE modem technology that Nokia has been working on for a decade."

Samueli added that Broadcomm’s future SoC with application processor will support frequency- and time-division versions of LTE. The company will first come out with a dual-core processor, followed by a quad-core and finally an advanced LTE thin modem with carrier aggregation that can support up to 300 megabits of data per second.

With the latest Snapdragon processor, it doesn't seem as though Qualcomm is going to relinquish any of its dominating maret share in this space. If anything, adding video capability and bringing 4G LTE to an affordable space within the market should bolster their position all the more.

Jessica Lipsky, I would have to say Yes! To the phone depenency for video but given the article's Snapdragon processing and LTE I would imagine the phone would be capable of video given the power and connectievety represented in that marrage. I am sure that if needed for market share or volume production there could be a lower cost version of the phone without video capacity but (at least in my mind) that would be a step back. Normally handset makers are looking forward both to new technology and more importantly new / added services. After all, that is where the money is!

Most phones display and record 1080p HD nowadays. Obviously a $150 phone is unlikely to have a 1080p display, and your contract may not have enough data to allow watching more than 1 HD full length movie per month...

Interestingly is this is a quad Cortex-A53, so it seems even cheap mid-range phones will be 64-bit in 6 months!